Sunday, April 10, 2005

Alright, it is a tenuous link, but it turns out that our dear mpt (Matthew Thomas) works for Canonical as a user interface designer. Canonical is the company that sponsors Ubuntu Linux. Matthew guest stars for the WordPress project, and has designed most of WP’s UI, and continues to help in improving it, and the documentation.

mpt’s usability review of Ubuntu is a balanced look at what could be improved. He is right about the fact that Ubuntu is yet the most usable distribution of Linux yet. That explains why your’s truly has been using Ubuntu exclusively for the last few months. Ubuntu’s new release can be downloaded if you wish to try out the LiveCD, or go ahead and install it on your machines.

Since http://wordpress.org is the first result returned for the search, it seems rather wasteful to have the sponsored result display on this search result page. It would be nice to have it turn up for searches for other terms (evil thoughts are blooming in my mind right now ).

Friday, January 21, 2005

The benchmark results look interestingly the same, for the static and dynamic version. All I can tell is that the static version has a pronouncedly low “shortest response time” which stands for the time to honor repeated requests. I presume the author used the staticize plugin for the static version.

Thursday, January 13, 2005

Referrer spam is when folks try to spam your referrers list in the server logs by trying to make it look like they linked to your site. This is not a big issue for most, since only you, the owner of the blog usually sees the referrers list, and so the spammer doesn’t gain any undue advantage, and yet, some people make their referrers list available publicly, and in this case, referrer spam works to the benefit of the spammer.

While reading that topic, I came across Ann Elisabeth’s Blog, which looks like a mother-lode of information related to comment spammers, and how to trace, and kill them. I haven’t read even half of what’s on the blog, and I must it is a great resource for information.

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Sunday, January 09, 2005

Now you can link a face to the users you find at #wordpress (on irc.freenode.net).

Check out the WordPress mugs gallery, if you want to know what some WordPress look like in the much-overhyped “real” world. As far as I am concerned, I have a mental image of what the characters I meet in the virtual world might look like — complete mental profiles and potraits stitched together from conversations and tidbits.

Should you be interested in contributing a mugshot of yours to the gallery, use the upload page, and name your image after your IRC nick, so Alex knows who’s picture it is.

The latest raffle at blogshares was a giveaway of 5 free hosting accounts at ReviseMedia, who have a WordPress oriented service. I had seen a ReviseMedia giveaway at AlexKing.org a few days ago. It is good to see hosts using WordPress as a selling proposition.

Saturday, September 18, 2004

MooKitty, or Kitten is a WordPress hacker, and a vital member of the WP community. While she is not helping out by squashing bugs, she runs GirlTech.net and she has some plans up here sleeve for the future!

Sunday, September 12, 2004

Ryan, or rboren, is probably the most elusive of the WP devs. His blog is a simple grey and brown affair with none of the bells and whistles that a wordpress blog can have. That it has comments disabled shows a little of how reserved he is. You will not find a link to his blog in a default WordPress blog’s index.php page, and it is quite possible that a lot of the users do not realize how prolific he is as a WordPress developer. For as long as I have been involved with WordPress, I have noticed Ryan tackling mundane, repetitive tasks, such as marking all of the source for the i18n and i10n effort – hours of boring, not-so-creative work. Ryan is also the resident rewrite guru, and along with Matt, generates a huge portion of the code commits in the CVS.
Thanks Ryan, for all the work, and for committing all our patches.

Read the interview for more details about what Cycling, Aerobics and WordPress have in common.